GradEx 102 and the importance of art, design and creativity

OCAD University's 102nd annual Graduate Exhibition - #GradEx102 - concluded on this past Sunday, having seen over 45000 visitors to our campus to take in over 900 graduating students' exhibitions. It was impressive. Graduates from across our programs - from Drawing and Painting, Environmental and Industrial Design and Digital Futures to name a few - presented their final projects in a variety of media, from tangible to digital. I had the opportunity to tour through GradEx many times, and I was consistently impressed with not only the quality of the projects on display, but also the ability of the students to articulate the purpose of their work, and what skills and competencies they learned throughout their education at OCAD U. From gorgeous works of art through to industrial designs that address healthcare and wearable computing, and video games that help people cope with mental health issues, GradEx offered an intensely personal insight into the people that fuel innovation and the creative economy.

Here is my take-away on what I learned from GradEx102:

Art, design and creativity are everywhere. All around us we see the benefit of the arts, and the importance of design and creativity to social and economic inclusion and productivity. 

OCAD U is art, design and creativity. Particularly at events like GradEx it is abundantly clear that our graduates exemplify how art, design and creativity help us to imagine not just a beautiful world, but one that seeks to change the world around us for the better. 

OCAD U is everywhere. Our graduates work in every sector of the economy. This is because the power of the imagination benefits all.

The students at GradEx102 - all OCAD U students - are the highly qualified and creative makers of the world. If the goal of education is to make one privately happy and publicly useful, then it is the goal of art and design education to make the public happy.

Design is Everywhere; OCADU is Design; OCADU is Everywhere

Canada is missing an important trend: Design Research and the Science Review

Much has been written of late on the Review of Fundamental Science report recently released publicly.  The Naylor Report as it has become known, has put forward a list of recommendations to update Canada's approach to fundamental science, or basic research in OECD terms.

OCAD U provided input to the Panel with a vision for fundamental science that encourages multidisciplinary research teams that include design researchers as the country prepares to address grand challenges.  

We called on the Panel to address the need to:

• Adapt federal research funding to meet the needs of researchers working in design disciplines;
• Improve coordination among the granting councils to support multidisciplinary research;
• Ensure that small universities are able to access research funding;
• Ensure Highly Qualified and Skilled Personnel (HQ&SP) in small institutions are not disadvantaged.

Some excerpts from our submission:
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Design research in Canada currently falls between the cracks in Canada's fundamental research funding ecosystem. As a result, Canada is not supporting these important areas of research, nor are we gaining the benefits that design disciplines add to fundamental science. This impairs our ability to participate in area of research importance internationally, and prevents us from fully establishing interdisciplinary research that can effectively tackle grand challenges.

Other countries offer models to consider as the federal government examines the country’s approach to fundamental science. Design research has an important role in fundamental science and knowledge creation. It comprises a set of disciplines that have inherent value as distinct areas of inquiry (research and knowledge creation), as well as being important inputs to downstream innovation capacity. Design disciplines are key areas of research activity internationally. 

Around the world, design-centred research has been seen as critical to future innovation and growth. The Australian Research Council has long instituted the 1203 Field of Research code to enable design organizations to apply for its Discovery and Linkage grants [See note below]. The United States’ National Endowment for the Arts explicitly supports design research as an area for funding. The European Commission’s Action Plan for Design-Driven Innovation (2013) calls for “research in which designers and design methods play a central role” and the recognition that, “co-design and other design methods can help to reinforce partnerships between multidisciplinary research teams and assist us in understanding the crosscutting issues and architecture of complex problems.” The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has reiterated design as a strategic priority area in its 2013-2018 AHRC Strategy. Canada is more than ten years behind the funding of design research by Asian governments, such as South Korea, which funded the Korean Design Research Institute at Seoul National University from 2002-2012, and Hong Kong, which funded the DesignSmart Initiative to support design research as one of its initiatives from 2004 until 2011.

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The good news is that the Panel Report has acknowledged the importance of design disciplines: the panel "notes that certain areas of research (e.g., health law, medical anthropology, design) are distinct disciplines that have not found consistent support from any of the granting councils" (p123). They call on the granting councils to provide "a welcoming home for these orphan disciplines, and to ensure that appropriate peer review mechanisms are structured for them." This also includes the need to expand the capacity of the granting councils to engage multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary researchers in enabling this transformation. 

These are among many recommendations that will certainly take time to sort out and sift through. But the Panel has done a great service to Canada's research community by putting forward important issues of research productivity, funding normalized to GDP (where we are lagging internationally),  and the relationship of science to international competitiveness and national  innovation and productivity.

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Note: Sub-codes in the 1203 Design category include 120301 Design History and Theory, 120302 Design Innovation, 120303 Design Management and Studio and Professional Practice, 120304 Digital and Interaction Design, 120305 Industrial Design, 120306 Textile and Fashion Design, 120307 Visual Communication Design (incl. Graphic Design), and 120399 Design Practice and Management not elsewhere classified.

From research to skills: On Canada's innovation carrying capacity

Yesterday's budget was notable for its singular focus on addressing innovation in Canada. Pundits are postulating the pros and cons and winners and losers, but we should see this budget as a positive step forward on many fronts: indigenous education, gender inclusivity, and a broad reimagining of educational supports from Employment Insurance through to more flexible student loans that more ably reflect the realities in which we work and live.

The Federal Government has a fine line to walk when it comes to education, given this is a provincial purview, but the measures outlined in the budget will go a long way to ensuring Canada can be competitive in the international market for social and economic prosperity. I will repeat that Canada needs a national minister of education - we are the only OECD country without one. This would go a long way to ensuring that a national skills strategy is a viable input to a national innovation strategy.

In these tumultuous and kinetic times (to borrow an apt phrase from Angela Carter) it behooves us to foster ways to structure education and research in ways that meet both the transactional and transformational needs of society. From long bets in artificial intelligence (the results of which are emerging from decades-long investment in basic science research) though to application of knowledge into new products and services, resilient regional economies require us to think through the issues and challenges of the day and to imagine futures and bring these to life.

OCAD University's new Academic Plan has this pivot at its core, building on the 141 years of excellence in art and design. We are fostering innovation literacy in our graduates through experiential learning and research experiences for undergraduate and graduate students. Working through our industry and community partners our students gain valuable insights while creating new knowledge and applications. Disciplinary Porosity; Language, Digital and Business Competencies; Criticality; Creativity - all of these are hallmarks of what makes OCAD U education unique, and how it makes possible the imagined futures the country needs for success.

Ensuring regions and individuals can pivot through retraining through such design thinking helps build the innovation carrying capacity of the country. This is dependent on ensuring we articulate our roles in promoting science, research and education into meaningful participation for all. This is inclusive innovation.

Skills for innovation and growth

News that the federal government's next budget will focus on innovation and skills is welcome. A few years ago I wrote an article about how innovation skills - what I called innovation literacy - can be taught, practiced and learned. And while I was focused at the time on applied research conducted in colleges, the outcomes associated with innovation skills are equally applicable across the entire educational spectrum, including primary and secondary. Innovation skills are needed for us to enable a full spectrum innovation capacity in Canada. I recently came across this post on skills that includes a very useful set of outcomes and "encyclopedia of real skills" - what the author calls soft skills (and which is a much better term). Focusing on what I have previously called the transactional and transformative potential of education means we can focus on outcomes specific to careers in addition to learning how to learn, and learning how to be an effective and able participant in society.  This is what Academica refers to as Education & Career Development: An Academic Mission for the 21st Century. Being able to hold these two seemingly opposing elements in mind at once is essential for future-proofing our society and economy. The reality is that these are not opposing elements at all, but rather the foundation for resilience.

Canada’s #1 Design School offering Executive Education and new Innovation Studio and SprintSpace

OCAD University is launching a new Executive Education program in a new Innovation Studio and SprintSpace.

The OCAD U Executive Education program features a flexible learning approach, enabling learners to accelerate learning and application into their workplace. We not only teach principles of art and design thinking as applied to business, we foster the application of these ideas into individual workplaces, amplifying the learning quotient of participants. We generate “sticky knowledge” to ensure that you can translate learning into practical outcomes for your workplace and career.

This new program received a generous gift from Scotiabank to create the Scotiabank Design Thinking Research Studio, a platform for a Design Thinking educational curriculum model that will generate research, workshops, executive education and an annual open public forum.

The Innovation Studio and SprintSpace is being built on Toronto's waterfront. The federal government recently announced SIF funding for OCADU's Campus for the Connected World (CCW), an exciting new space in the Daniels Waterfront — City of the Arts building complex. As outlined on our project page, the CCW will house initiatives specific to innovation training, design thinking, Big Data design and accelerator capacity that support commercialization and bring design skills to emergent companies.

The CCW space opens in early 2018, and the OCAD U Executive Education launches this spring.

The OCAD University Executive Education design brief

Please contact me if you would like more information or to become involved.

Partnerships and resilient regional economies

For some time I've maintained that partnerships are a key unit of analysis for the development of a robust innovation economy. More to the point, we need to foster and encourage public+private partnerships for research and development - or P3RD. The P3RD Participatory Innovation model provides a mechanism to understand and support the innovation carrying capacity of national economies: the ability to proactively create value from public investments in basic research by fostering private sector receptivity and engagement to the public science and technology (S&T) and private research and development (R&D) systems.

The function of innovation intermediaries are core to Public+Private Partnerships for Research and Development (P3RD). We can best understand this function by looking at how national governments measure R&D and innovation activities. For this we can turn to the OECD Frascati Manual, which outlines Basic research, Applied research, and Experimental development as the continuum of R&D – from idea to invoice.

Basic research

“…is experimental or theoretical work undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge of the underlying foundation of phenomena and observable facts, without any particular application or use in view.”

Applied research

“…is original investigation undertaken in order to acquire new knowledge . . . directed primarily towards a specific practical aim or objective.”

Experimental development

“… is systematic work, drawing on existing knowledge gained from research and/or practical experience, which is directed to producing new materials, products or devices, to installing new processes, systems and services, or to improving substantially those already produced or installed.” 


(OECD Frascati Manual 2.1.64)

This continuum matters, and the goal in standing up P3RD is to locate the activities undertaken within this context. The continuum from basic and applied research through to experimental development constitutes the types of activities that make up the innovation carrying capacity of national economies: the ability to proactively create value from public investments in basic research by fostering private sector receptivity and engagement to the public S&T systems. 

Here is a useful article on the value of partnerships, and the author's perspective on this uniquely Canadian approach. I've called this barn raising the innovation economy. P3RD enacts a participatory innovation and creates resilient regional economies and clusters. More on this in the months to come.

CCA Launches Expert Panel on the State of S&T and IR&D in Canada

The Council of Canadian Academies has launched a new assessment on The State of Science and Technology and Industrial Research and Development in Canada. The Panel is being chaired by Max Blouw, president of Wilfrid Laurier University. As stated in the CCA press release, a multidisciplinary and multisectoral expert panel has been assembled to provide input to the federal ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED). The panel will address the question: "What is the current state of science and technology and industrial research and development in Canada?"

This comes at an important time as the Canadian government is reviewing basic research (the Review of Fundamental Science) and innovation. The CCA has provided key policy input via a series of reports on Canada's research and innovation capacity - see the list here. I am pleased to be serving on this panel (having served on the 2012 report panel).